a bright day in the garden

The tide of Strulch is slowly creeping in.  The Camassia leaves in the far rose bed are elongating by the day, and it can't be long before it becomes impossible to tuck mulch around them.  Reader, mulching a bed with bulbs in it is a job far better done before the bulbs are in leaf, but failing that the second best time to do a gardening job is when you are are able to get round to doing it.  I have crumbled mushroom compost around their foliage, a desperately fiddly task, but haven't yet finished applying the final layer of Strulch because I ran out of fish, blood and bone.

The packaging of fish, blood and a bone is a swizz, like oatcakes or cornflakes.  OK, the manufacturers put the net weight on the tub, so you can't say they lied to you, but when you open the lid, the contents come barely half way up the sides.  Cereal firms say that some settling may occur during transit, but I don't believe that fish, blood and bone loses half of its volume between the packaging line and the garden centre.  I'm certain that oatcakes don't, not unless something has gone very badly wrong and they have got broken in transit, so there is no reason for Nairns to make boxes that are an inch taller than the two layers of biscuits they contain.

I have just written myself a list of the gardening jobs I am going to do next week.  According to the list I am going to buy more mushroom compost and fish, blood and bone, and potting compost, plant out all the potted bulbs, repot the dahlias, and go to the dump.  Given that I have two days booked for non-gardening activities, the list looks a shade ambitious, especially when I remember that the potted bulbs include the Narcissus obvallaris destined for the daffodil lawn.  I haven't counted the pots, but there are a lot.

Something, possibly the pheasants but perhaps the blackbirds, is scraping Strulch off the edges of the beds and over the lawn.  It is a nuisance, but once the leaves of the violets and everything else round the front of the beds grow up, they should hold more of it in place.  It would form a dense mat more quickly if it rained, and since rain is not forecast maybe I should get the hose out, but it seems like such a faff when there are lots of other things to do.  I am hoping that heavy dew will do the trick.  The pheasants are a nuisance in the garden full stop, since they eat flowers.  I wish our cats would go out a bit more.

You can see that this blog post has no coherent narrative structure, but weeks spent gardening can be like that.  While I was in the process of digging up the turf from what are now the two rose beds and relaying it to form a path elsewhere, I still worked in my last City job.  I remember my colleagues' mounting incredulity as at the start of each week they politely asked me what I'd been doing in the garden, and the answer was always the same, digging up part of the lawn.